The Island Read Free Page B

earlier and found a room to rent on the seafront in Hania - an easy task at this stage of the season when most holidaymakers had already departed.
     
    These were the last days of their vacation, and having reluctantly visited Knossos and the archaeological museum at Iraklion, Ed was keen to spend the few days before their long boat journey back to Piraeus on the beach. Alexis, however, had other plans.
     
    ‘I’m going to visit an old friend of my mother’s tomorrow, ’ she announced as they sat in a harbourside taverna waiting to give their order. ‘She lives the other side of Iraklion, so I’ll be gone most of the day.’
     
    It was the first time she had mentioned her pilgrimage to Ed and she braced herself for his reaction.
     
    ‘That’s terrific!’ he snapped, adding resentfully: ‘Presumably you’re taking the car?’
     
    ‘Yes, I will if that’s okay. It’s a good hundred and fifty miles and it’ll take me days if I have to go on local buses.’
     
    ‘Well I suppose I don’t really have a choice, do I? And I certainly don’t want to come with you.’
     
    Ed’s angry eyes flashed at her like sapphires as his sun-tanned face disappeared behind his menu. He would sulk for the rest of the evening but Alexis could take that given that she had rather sprung this on him. What was harder to cope with, even though it was equally typical of him, was his total lack of interest in her plan. He did not even ask the name of the person she was going to visit.
     
    Not long after the sun had risen over the hills the following morning, she crept out of bed and left their hotel.
     
    Something very unexpected had struck her when she looked Plaka up in her guidebook. Something her mother had not mentioned. There was an island opposite the village just off the coast, and although the entry for it was minimal, miss-able even, it had captured her imagination:
     
     
    SPINALONGA: Dominated by a massive Venetian fortress, this island was seized by the Turks in the eighteenth century. The majority of Turks left Crete when it was declared autonomous in 1898 but the inhabitants refused to give up their homes and their lucrative smuggling trade on Spinalonga. They only left in 1903 when the island was turned into a leper colony. In 1941, Crete was invaded by the Germans and occupied until 1945, but the presence of lepers meant Spinalonga was left alone. Abandoned in 1957.
     
     
     
    It appeared that the raison d’être of Plaka itself had been to act as a supply centre for the leper colony, and it intrigued Alexis that her mother had made no mention of this at all. As she sat at the wheel of the hired Cinquecento, she hoped she might have time to visit Spinalonga. She spread the map of Crete out on the empty passenger seat and noticed, for the first time, that the island was shaped like a languid animal asleep on its back.
     
    The journey took her eastwards past Iraklion, and along the smooth, straight coastal road that passed through the insanely overdeveloped modern strips of Hersonisos and Malia. Occasionally she would spot a brown signpost indicating some ancient ruin nestling incongruously among the sprawling hotels. Alexis ignored all these signs. Today her destination was a settlement that had thrived not in the twentieth century BC but in the twentieth century AD and beyond.
     
    Passing mile upon mile of olive groves and, in places where the ground became flatter on the coastal plains, huge plantations of reddening tomatoes and ripening grapes, she eventually turned off the main road and began the final stage of her journey towards Plaka. From here, the road narrowed and she was forced to drive in a more leisurely way, avoiding small piles of rocks which had spilled down from the mountains into the middle of the road and, from time to time, a goat ambling across in front of her, its devilishly close-set eyes glaring at her as she passed. After a while the road began to climb, and after one particularly sharp